OT: My Summer Vacation

I live in New Jersey, where summer vacation has barely started at the time the Midwest is beginning its back-to-school shopping. Yeah, it’s high summer here. We aren’t even thinking about Office Depot for another four weeks. A brief news digest will surely show what I mean:

• I am a Bastille Day baby. I have always enjoyed my stylish birthday! When I was younger and footloose I often went to French restaurants to celebrate. This year, I made my own cake, over my daughters’ objections. (Before you start to awwww and assume they were devastated at not being able to bake for me, they were actually pushing for a Carvel ice cream cake.) It was a Devil Dog cake, recipe courtesy of Deb at Smitten Kitchen. More on birthday cake later, in a family history sort of post, even.

• I saw the New York Times story on family trees in the age of reproductive technology, had some thoughts and wrote a post which I’ve been mulling over to make sure my thoughts still hold up. I will post it, but for now I’ll just say I hate pseudo-trend pieces in the lifestyle section of the Times, for what it’s worth.

• I just discoveredThe Diamond in the Window, a wonderful blog about children’s literature. What’s really great are the thoughtful recommendations passed along by the blogger’s own daughters, aged 11 and 9. I predict this blog will give me many answers on frustrating rainy summer days.

• Played around with PowerPoint to make a simple, hierarchical family tree for a core group I’ve been researching among my paternal lines. I’ve been thinking of summarizing some of this research in a narrative to send around in Christmas cards to extended family, and the family tree diagram would be a visual aid. Doesn’t this sound like the sort of thing that would get me dropped from Christmas card lists?

• Went to the beachhere. And here. Before you ask: Snooki is nowhere to be seen, and indeed, unless the Jersey Shore crowd likes string cheese and juice boxes for lunch, they would be quite out of place at these beaches.

• Am teaching Latin and German to my daughters. The Latin is for the older one, who needs to review for the fall, with the help of the Cambridge Latin series textbook. My long-ago, very basic high-school Latin is creaking back, hurray. The German lessons are something both kids have actually been asking about for some time. Their motives are not exactly pure — they are entirely too focused on determining whether a certain schoolmate and native German speaker is using swear words, for instance. Also, they have noticed that I sometimes talk with one of my sisters in German when we don’t want them to understand (we both majored in it in college, but sis is way better at it). It all adds up to a level of avid interest that’s touching, it really is.

In re Snooki – I’m with Chris Christie:
“What it does is takes a bunch of New Yorkers… drops them at the Jersey Shore and tries to make America feel like this is New Jersey. I can tell people: they want to know what New Jersey really is? I welcome them to come to New Jersey any time.”